Introducing Gradient's PDF Extraction API
Mar 6, 2024
Gradient Team
Introducing Gradient’s Accelerator Block API for PDF Extraction
Nearly 80% of enterprise data is stored in formats that impede its effective use, with the majority as PDFs. This not only limits data usability but also highlights a substantial reservoir of untapped potential within these organizations.
To solve this, we’re excited to introduce a new AI Agent Accelerator Block designed to enable businesses to easily and effectively extract text or data from PDFs. Our Accelerator Block will return 1) a near perfect extraction of text and 2) a JSON response of the extract. Developers simply need to upload their files via Gradient’s UI or call the PDF extraction API.
To get started, check out our developer documentation or test drive it on our playground.
How It Stacks Up
Compared to similar PDF extraction products available on the market today, Gradient outperforms, providing a more efficient and effective solution for PDF extraction.
Formatting and Accuracy: Although comparable products may offer similar results in terms of text extraction, the ability to identify and return proper formatting is vital. With Gradient, extraction is broken down meticulously, identifying subtle details that are often misidentified or unidentifiable such as the varying levels of headers. For those who are implementing AI, this is critical especially in leveraging this data for RAG and LLM inference.
Table Understanding: Extracting data from a table can be complicated, and if parsed incorrectly, the data is effectively unusable. Gradient's PDF extraction leverages tuned multi-modal LLMs with an advanced understanding of table structures and visual hierarchy, enabling it to deliver precise table breakdowns - critical for industries like financial services.
Head to Head Comparisons
Let’s dive into a live example to see a direct comparison against comparable services. Below you’ll find two sections from 3M Company’s 10-Q, highlighting a text excerpt and table excerpt.
Example 1: Text Excerpt
Example 2: Table Excerpt
When it comes to text excerpts, other solutions are unable to recognize formatting and intricate details, such as the ability to differentiate between level of headers that are used.
Gradient <> Google Document AI - Text Excerpts
Even with simple text (paragraph) extraction, Gradient's PDF extraction service preserves more hierarchy for the paragraph, separating out the section title. This makes it easier for you to manage document subhierarchies, which is critical for effective RAG management and AI information processing.
Gradient <> PDFMiner - Text Excerpts
PDFMiner provides no JSON structure in its output, so is unable to provide the underlying document structure in any situation.
Gradient <> Google Document AI - Table Extraction
When comparing the difference between Gradient and Document AI's ability to accurately extract data from tables, you'll notice that Document AI is unable to maintain any of the table structure. Gradient is designed to ensure table structure is preserved at a substantially higher accuracy than otherwise.
You can also evaluate the raw responses below.
Gradient <> PDFMiner
You'll also see here that PDFMiner is entirely incapable of extracting the relevant data in this table snippet.
About Gradient Accelerator Blocks
Gradient provides comprehensive building blocks, designed to help you rapidly build best-in-class AI agents on a single platform. Gradient offers Accelerator Blocks for:
LLM Development
AI Agents
Domain-Specific Solutions
Accessible via easy-to-use APIs, you can accelerate your AI development process without having to worry about the setup or complexities. If you like our Accelerator Block for PDF extraction, discover all the other task-specific Accelerator Blocks that available today: Personalization, Sentiment Analysis, Q&A, Entity Extraction, and Document Summarization.
